The core concept behind Karaf Cellar is that each node can be a part of one or more groups that provide the node distributed memory for keeping data (e.g. configuration, features information, other) and a topic which is used to exchange events with the rest of the group nodes.

Each group comes with a configuration, which defines which events are to be broadcasted and which are not. Whenever a local change occurs to a node, the node will read the setup information of all the groups that it belongs to and broadcasts the event to the groups that are whitelisted to the specific event.

The broadcast operation happens via a distributed topic provided by the group. For the groups that the broadcast reaches, the distributed configuration data will be updated so that nodes that join in the future can pickup the change.